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so instead of making server features better they are catering to a niche userbase of freebsd desktop user who want awesome graphics performance. facepalm

At one point, I think Intel dropped support for their non-KMS drivers.

I think that's back now, but it won't be long until they drop it again.

Then you won't be able to use any graphics at all on FreeBSD without this code. That's already true on the AMD side, where new hardware is only supported by the gallium drivers and requires KMS code FreeBSD doesn't have yet.

how different is the different bsd's. linux distrobutions are pretty much the same stuff just compiled with slightly different compile options of patches and aybe a few different providers of support packages, but in general once code gets merged upstream all the distros have the same codebase withing a short amount of time. is the different bsd's wildly different codebases or somethign to that effect?

KMS is important for security reasons, since it allows you to run the X server as a non-root user. Furthermore, many Xorg drivers are depricating and dropping UMS support. This is something long overdue (and has nothing to do with performance, FYI, since a mode-set is usually something that happens only once per boot).

how different is the different bsd's. linux distrobutions are pretty much the same stuff just compiled with slightly different compile options of patches and aybe a few different providers of support packages, but in general once code gets merged upstream all the distros have the same codebase withing a short amount of time. is the different bsd's wildly different codebases or somethign to that effect?

I think they're pretty different with little code sharing.
But that hasn't mattered before because X.org was running separate in userspace without tight integration with the kernel.

A good design would be that drivers declare what versions of libraries they want to use or even have a checksum that can be used.
This way it's really easy to spot what needs to be updated when changing api's.

It would be possible to make translation libraries or spot what drivers need to be changed much faster, easier and reliable.